Category: current affairs

Absurdity

12-12-12

Because I can’t resist the date.

Urban Abstract 2, 2012
Circles and Levels and Clocklike Movement

This particular confluence of numerical coincidence won’t happen again this century.  Proper appreciation must be shown.

Or, as Stephen Jay Gould once said, “I have always and dearly loved calendrical questions because they display all our foibles in revealing miniature.  Where else can we note, so vividly revealed, such an intimate combination of all the tricks that recalcitrant nature plays upon us, linked with all the fallacies of reason, and all the impediments of habit and emotion, that make the fulfillment of our urge to understand even more more difficult…”

It is in our nature to reject coincidence as simply what it is, especially when it comes to cosmic events.  Long ago human beings decided the devices we invented to keep track of time actually meant something to Time itself, as if the universe was somehow required to acknowledge our conceits.

Still, even as a purely invented coincidence, 12-12-12 is kind of cool.  How many babies will be born today and be considered extra special just because?  If someone happens to win a lottery today, the efficacy of numerically based sympathetic magic will be reinforced, even though it will still have exactly the same relationship as the odds of a coin face coming up with each of a hundred tosses as if the collective numbers of heads or tails somehow imposes necessity on each one (namely, zero).

On the other hand, any day you wake up with something to marvel on is a win, so I’ll take my small pleasures where I can.

I’ll be writing up a year-end assessment in a couple of weeks.  Soon it will be 2013—a numerical change about as meaningful as today’s date in the greater scheme of anything.  For instance, it is 2012 in our calendar system (Gregorian—the older Julian is similar, lacking but 13 days, which would make today the last day of November, with today’s numerically alliterative advent still to come) but 5773 in the Hebrew calendar. (A more concurrent calendar is the Holocene, which starts at the beginning of the Holocene Era—ours—by adding ten thousand years.  So it’s 12012 H.E.  I like that.)

It’s 1434 in the Islamic calendar.  Sometimes I ponder the significance of time lapsed in cultural evolution to try to understand where a given institution is along the line.  In this case, I remember where christianity was in 1400 when seeking to comprehend current attitudes and events.  They were on the verge of the Reformation, with seething splinter groups roiling under the surface about to explode into a family feud they’re still trying to settle.  Hm.

One of the youngest calendars is the so-called “Minguo” which is from the Republic of China (Taiwan) and dates from the founding of the Republic in 1912.  Their centenary was just celebrated.  It’s 101 in the ROC Minguo calendar.

We’re fortunate not be stuck using the Unix calendar, which is expressed in seconds.

The true measure of time is change.  Change in the environment, certainly, but for our purposes, changes in ourselves.  There is no calendar for such things.  Some changes are temporary, some seasonal, others permanent.  They may be profound or just occurrences that seem to have little import.  It’s a question of where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Passagway
Passageway

It’s a common fallacy that our lives are telec, that they have a narrative structure, a beginning and an end in terms of purposes and goals.  If they do, it is a fact that we impose such things, but we’re not born with them.  (Born into them, perhaps, in the case of those who arrive swaddled in family expectations actively imposed.)  We have a start and a finish, which is not quite the same thing.  In between, it’s up to us to find meaning and purpose, make it out of whole cloth if we must, but waiting around for cosmic enlightenment to tell us what we’re here for invites a wasted life.  In an attempt to impose structure and suggest meaning, humans have invented numerous things—like calendars, with attendant rituals and anniversaries.  Out of the matrix of such things many of us find relevance among ourselves and that is not a bad thing at all.

In truth, each of us brings to such things what we have and are, whether we accept others’ definitions or not.  I wish people Merry Christmas despite the fact that I impute no validity in the defining mythology, because Christmas is what we make it.  I don’t have a lot of patience for people bent on souring everyone else’s holiday by indulging a political or theological hissy-fit—on either side of the Belief Divide.  I have my own resonances with it and take pleasure from the memory and æstethic significance on which I accrued that meaning.  I watch A Christmas Carol every year, drink egg nog, embrace my friends, and nurture a hearth-glow of fellowship.  I do not have to accept the fables to experience a “holiday spirit” every bit as real as those who do—nor do I appreciate those who insist on dumping cynicism and political scatalogy onto the season in an attempt to ruin it for everyone else in a misguided pursuit of some adherence to reason.  Truth and fact are often only coincidentally related, and the truth of the season is something greater than what is contained in the details of a given story.

The Gift of the Magi is my guiding narrative…for what it may be worth.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Season’s Wishes, etc etc etc.

Whatever calendar you use, have a good day.

culture

Games, Women, Growing Up, Remembrance

I want to talk a little bit about women.

I like to count myself as a feminist. Unapologetically. I would like to believe that I’ve been one more or less forever, and maybe on some level that’s true (and if so I credit early exposure to science fiction, which I’ll talk about later**), but really what I could point to as early feminism was more a matter of an idealized attitude about fair play, not any kind of studied assessment concerning women’s rights and so forth. My progress toward self-conscious feminism took a while.

First, a video:

Okay, it is that negative reaction she experienced which (a) I don’t “get” in any visceral way and (b) I find continually, almost universally shrugged off as “harmless” by people who otherwise would never dream of behaving that way. Which sets the stage for this:

Really, Tiedemann?  You really get that from a bunch of mouth breathers in basements playing online games?

It has been my experience that one of the components of “gaming” has always been a self-defensive insularity, an in-group “bunker mentality” that defaults to mindless rejection whenever anyone suggests that maybe the game in question is, you know, stupid or dangerous or fosters questionable attitudes.  Balance goes out the window when the game is threatened, even its accoutrements.  Online games or field sports, I don’t care which, there is a mindset that some adherents embrace which reduces reason to the buzzing of a fly when the game itself is threatened.  (You may not quite grasp this unless you have been threatened with bodily harm by members of a varsity football team for the mere suggestion that something else is more important for the school than new uniforms for them, that maybe it would be a bad idea to cut Band because there isn’t enough money in the budget for both.)

Combine that with the nature of in-groups and you have a perfect recipe for this kind of nonsense.

And yes, I think teaching people that just because they belong to a group gives them unquestioned privileges vis-à-vis The Rest Of The World is a formula for creating objectionable behaviors in certain members of that group.

In this case, the members of the He Man Woman Haters Club.

I grew up watching The Little Rascals on tv, and one of the repeated tropes was Alfalfa’s inability to “man up” and tell Darla to stay in her place.  Spanky and the others had their club and Darla and her friends attempted again and again to break into it.  Barring that, divide and conquer.  It was an early lesson in sexual politics, and I wonder sometimes if the writers and producers knew what it was they were portraying.  The subtext was the immasculation of Alfalfa, who continually embarrassed himself—and by extension The Gang—with his romantic goofball behavior when Darla winked at him, bent her finger, and drew him off for a tryst.*

The message was clear: girls are not to be trusted, not to be tolerated, unless you want to be a doofus like Alfalfa.

Then puberty hits.

Personally, boys who don’t know how to talk to girls well into adulthood I think don’t know how to talk to other boys, either, but the games template of childhood provides a format for pretense.  Don’t discuss feelings, don’t share anxieties, talk about the Game.  The Game substitutes for genuine sharing.

Who am I talking about?  Not a majority, certainly, or we would be unable to have this conversation on any level.  But a large enough slice of the male population to cause trouble.

Wait a minute, Tiedemann, you’re not blaming the games, are you?

Tempting as that is for me, no.  While I do believe the games reflect the attitudes of those who are involved in them, blaming the games is like blaming Jack Daniels for drunk driving.

(I don’t like most games, I admit.  I’m not competitive that way and most games are zero sum endeavors.  I like chess, but I don’t play it to win, and for some reason that seems to be okay in chess, there’s no chest beating of any kind.  But I was once nearly beaten up in a bar by a pissed off foosball player who invited himself into our game and got angry because I didn’t play to win.  I don’t like that attitude and I avoid it when I can and I find it wired into most games.)

Men who beat women, who killed them, who are outraged by feminism, who think in terms of “women’s proper place” are alien to me and rather pathetic—instead of working on themselves and their own shortcomings, they blame failure on everybody else, and the women in their lives are close and available for them to exercise what they conceive as their “manhood” in the most bestial way.  I would pity them but for the very real damage they do.

I wrote about that damage and one of my defining moments here.

I’m thinking about these things today because it happens to be an anniversary.  Twenty-three years ago today the Montreal Massacre occurred.  A frustrated, pathetic excuse of a human being decided (assuming such actions can be derived from a process of decision making) to vent his anger at failure by—wait for it—blaming women for his inability to fulfill himself.

But remembering that, I’m also thinking about the new women in my life.  I’m working for Left Bank Books now and in the past weeks of learning my way around I’ve been working with some of the coolest women around.  What a shame it would be if they couldn’t do what they do and be who they are because some bipeds with external genitals and low I.Q. held sway in our society and decided—because they lack the imagination or perception to see past surfaces and their own limbic reactions—women “shouldn’t be doin’ that kinda stuff.”

(As I’ve written before, I do credit my lifelong love of books and an early exposure to science fiction for preparing the ground for the feminism of my adulthood.  I’m hard pressed to think of a better antidote for what is, at base, a profoundly anti-intellectual cultural ill.  The inability to reason, to understand, to empathize, all this feeds the kind of insularity and self-limitation that can result in these deeply irrational—indeed, anti-rational—behaviors.  Do I think reading alone is a cure?  Of course not.  But, for cripessake, guys, read a book once in a while!  Get out of your own heads!)

I’m grateful to the women in my life: friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and I can say without reservation that I’d rather be in their club than in Spanky’s.

Better yet, let’s stop all this nonsense about clubs.  I never got my membership card in the He Man Woman Haters Club—I was too much a wimp to qualify—but then, I never applied.

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*Tryst?  Why, yes.  What else is it?  She gets him off alone, there’s a lot of goofy grinning, sharing of a meal, coy conversation.  No, of course there’s no sex, but Darla has segregated Alfalfa away from the other boys and…it’s all done in such childish innocence, but really look at those interludes and analyze them, then imagine Darla and Alfalfa about ten years older.

And of course the proto-stereotyping of gender roles is right there.  Darla is the seductress—ostensibly she’s trying to break down the group cohesion among The Gang, but that’s secondary—and Alfalfa is the male naif, completely taken by Darla’s attention and unable to control himself—or even speak intelligently.  And of course when it’s over he’s the one who’s been embarrassed—been “had” by the female and made to look foolish.

_______________________________________________________

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** Science fiction was where I first and continually encountered strong, self-possessed female characters and models for what I came to believe women were, both potentially and preferably.  Sure, there were plenty of the standard models in SF, but there were also powerful, independent women who early on showed me that any assumptions about female inability, weakness, or ideas of “proper place” were all just noise.

culture

American Epochs

I’m just noodling over an idea, perhaps not even an original one, but I’ve been acquiring and reading a number of books this last few years on American history, and given the tenor of this past year of national politics, I’ve been toying with the idea of “periods” of American history.  That is, definable epochs fundamentally different from that which went before.

What triggered this particular thread is on the desk in front of my now. Kevin Phillips’ new book, 1775: A Good Year For Revolution, recently published by Viking.

In his preface, Why 1775, he writes:

Seventeen Seventy-Five…stands for the somewhat forgotten and widely misunderstood first year of the American Revolution.  If 1775 hadn’t been a year of successful nation building, 1776 might have been a year of lost opportunity, quiet disappointment, and continued colonial status.

Basically, the book is about all the pesky networking, infrastructure, planning, and groundwork that preceded the Declaration of Independence and without which the actual rebellion, not to mention, the Revolution, would have been stillborn.

We tend not to think this way.  Not just Americans, but we exemplify it through an ongoing process of semi-deification of Significant Men.  We like to believe that without “these people” and their character, all these wonderful things would not have happened, and while there is certainly some truth to that—it’s hard to argue with the fact that if George Washington had been a different kind of person then the outcome would have been very different—it is by no means either the whole story or even sufficient to explain how things transpired.  But it’s easier to put a face on a period and blithely assume that it was all because of That One.

We don’t like the idea that without thoroughly, clever, and industrial stagecraft, the performance might never go on.

(Consider war.  While it might be somewhat true that battles are won by generals, at least in some instances, wars are won by logistics.  The people and, more importantly, the system responsible for getting the bullets to the front are more important to the overall effort than the guys with the guns, who after all can do nothing without those bullets.)

But this component of history is not sexy, so we tend to focus on heroes and gestures and sometimes even credit divine intervention rather than take note of all the nameless, faceless people who did the hard day-in day-out labor of building the systems that allowed for success.

That said, we still have the results to consider, and it occurred to me to toss a dime into the debate by suggesting that American history is demarcated into three epochs that are clearly definable.  By this I mean periods begun by events that fundamentally changed who we were as a nation.  Things which caused shifts in the common apprehension of our identity significantly different from what went before and led to long periods of more or less stable assumptions of what it meant to be an American.

The first of these is of course the Revolutionary period, which I contend spans the period from 1763 to 1801.  The end of the French and Indian War (in many ways the first world war) set colonial thinkers inexorably on the path to independence.  Without the treaties and the subsequent actions in the aftermath of that war, the components of the Revolution would not have coalesced.  American colonists during this period reconceived their identity away from British subjects to Americans.  The entire period is capped by the election of Thomas Jefferson where we see the political and cultural landscape “set” for the next 50 years, an end to revolutionary evolution and a settling into adjustment to a new order.

The second epoch, obviously, is the Civil War period, which I suggest lasted from 1850 till the end of Reconstruction, 1876, at which point again we see a stabilizing of the landscape, which endured in its major features until the Great Depression.

Which leads to the third epoch, the Depression/World War period, lasting from 1929 until the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we once more see a broad “settling in” and acceptance of the new vision of who and what we are that persists to this day.

In each instance, the significant consequence is that, as a nation, we changed our view of who we are and conducted ourselves as Americans differently than we did before.

I have no idea what the fulcrum of the next epoch will be, or whether it has already happened.  These things take time to recognize.  (It’s possible that 9/11 represents such an event, but in too many ways it resulted in essentially a continuation of Cold War thinking.  The mindset of the average American today might not be that different from what it was in 1957, at least in regards to our global relationship.  I don’t know.)

It might be argued that the civil rights movement represents a significant sign of a new epoch, but I don’t think so.  Much as I might feel ill at ease over this, I see that as a consequences of the third period rather than as its own event.  The massive social “leveling” of the Great Depression combined with the revelations of abuses in Nazi Germany eroded long-held attitudes about race and opened the door to the successful campaigns of the various equality movements that have still not ended.  Even so, “civil rights” claims and assertions have never been absent from our political landscape and seem to have been immune, as ideas, from the specifics of massive epochal change.

Anyway, I thought this might be interesting to ponder, so I’m putting it out there.  As I say, nothing perhaps new, but certainly unresolved.  Thinking about it this way, we might want to consider more constructively just what it is we want to be next.

culture

War On Women

My previous post, over-the-top as it was in some ways (yet heartfelt and, I think, not misdirected) spurred a few remarks about the so-called War On Women.  There are people who claim this is a myth, a straw man argument, a distraction, that there is no war on women, only the mouthings of a few extremists with no real authority and, really, nothing has or will change.

I can agree to an extent that maybe War On Women is perhaps an overstatement, because—and it’s a fine distinction—I don’t really believe most of the politicians engaged in it care one way or the other.  It has become a useful polemic for them to stir the ire of their base and garner votes for the things they do care about.  It’s like race-baiting, which I think few of those who indulge it actually believe in but will nevertheless employ the language because they collect a constituency around it.  It’s bait, in other words, to attract a following which they can then use for other things.

In this sense, claiming that it’s a “war” is perhaps inaccurate, an overstatement. It was, perhaps, more a war with women, a loud pyrotechnic show that kept our attention over here when it should have been over there. If true, then the hammering on contraceptive access and abortion and the blocking of various anti-rape and violence-against-women bills really meant something else. Battlefield tactics in a cause of a different nature. One might take some comfort in that.

Except for those who feel themselves being used as human shields and missiles in a cause disingenuous at its core and fraught with unintended consequences.  It would not be the first time in history that the cynical use of a rhetorical position (to defeat an opponent, rally a populace, misdirect attention from other things) took on a life of its own and produced results no one wanted.

I think the Right has seen some of those unintended consequences in the last election.

How hard is this?  Equality means we should not limit people based on their biological characteristics, which include race and gender, as well as physical capacity, health, mobility challenges, and so forth.

As for the rhetoric, I will leave you with this, which cuts to the chase rather better than anything I might say:

culture

The Following Is Brought To You by the Slut Vote

From the Department of the Chronically Clueless, we learn that Romney lost the election because of the Slut Vote.  I thought I’d heard everything, but this is a new candor I’d not quite expected.

I’ve been saying for years that the major driver behind much of the deep core, far right, religiously self-identified GOP agenda is an obsession over Other People’s Sex Lives.  This past year and change, they’ve been making it explicit in surprising, sometimes funny, but usually jaw-droppingly amazing ways, and this is just a continuation of it.  If anyone is inclined to cut them slack over this anymore, it is an exercise in strained tolerance.

As far as I’m concerned, we had this argument in the Sixties and in terms of how people actually live, it was settled in favor of personal choice and a rejection of what I term Levitical Law.  In other words, all that stuff about the evils of sex is just the neurotic shaming some people who are by virtue of nurture (they were raised that way) or even maybe nature (they are perpetually self-conscious and easily offended by, you know, personal stuff) insist on putting on the rest of us.

For the record, I like sex.  I don’t think there is anything innately wrong with it.  As a friend of mine once said, “It’s all good, some’s better.”  (Also, for the record, I am talking about consensual sex, not rape, not coercive insistence, not child abuse, but mutually beneficial, consensual sex.)  I do not believe sex should be put in a box or straitjacketed by social convention born out of other peoples’ inability to be comfortable with it.

In other words, it’s none of your business who I fuck or how and I refuse to accept guilt or shame you think I should feel because you can’t get past your own “Eww!” reflex.

(Because also clearly, that’s not quite it either, since some of the biggest proponents of the anti-sex league are themselves congenitally indulgent.  As long as “no one finds out” they do everything they tell the rest of us we shouldn’t do.  Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, go down the list.  Also, apparently, the active anti-choicers who find personal redemption by parading in front of Planned Parenthood clinics seem not to understand the concept of other people having rights, as close to 20% of the women with picket signs seem to end up in those same clinics availing themselves of the services they so ardently wish to deny every other woman!  I abhor the politics of hypocrisy.)

Many years ago I stood in line outside a theater showing an X-rated film.  An earnest young woman was handing out fliers decrying the awfulness of the sinful film being shown.  She got to me and starting haranguing me not to go in.  I asked her, what is it you find so offensive?  It emerged that she herself had never seen the film in question.  I insisted she do so, I would buy her a ticket, after all if you’re going to protest Speech you should know what speech it is you’re trying to suppress.  Scared her to death.  She ran away.  I have no pity.  It wasn’t the film she was protesting, it was, in my opinion, a compulsion to deny an idea—that sex is okay.

People abuse sex all the time.  Hurting people to get your rocks off is never okay.  I do not for a minute excuse rape.  But I make a distinction between healthy sex and hurting people.  It is the hurting part that we should pay attention to.  Instead, it seems, some people can’t separate the two.  (It is unfortunate and sad that for some folks, sex is never anything but hurtful.  Something should be done to address the circumstances that lead to that.  But taking away the rights and abilities of others to engage in mutual, consensual, wholesome sex is not the way.)

So I  think my response to the apologists for the GOP who have decided this is why they lost is—fucking right.  Fair, perhaps, is fair—the Right doesn’t want the Left to take away their guns, then the Right should stop trying to take away everybody’s sex.

Maybe that should be a new Third Party—Sluts for Liberty.

I think I prefer the Slut agenda to the Prude Platform.

culture

A Final Thought (Maybe)

I’m listening to Bartok.  The Miraculous Mandarin, a recording by the St. Louis Symphony, Leonard Slatkin conducting.

Earlier I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR.  A report caught my attention about—you guessed it—why Mitt Romney lost.  Or, more to the point, why he almost won.  It had to do with something I find utterly baffling about the American political consciousness.  I don’t know, maybe it’s true everywhere.

Basically, that during most of the campaign Romney ran on issues and did little to “let people know him personally.”  This, according to the report, was the cause of his low approval numbers.  People didn’t “like” him because he seemed cold and distant.  In August, his campaign turned that around by presenting a more “homey” Mitt, highlighting his “personality” and his “likeableness.”

It worked.  Suddenly people warmed to him, his approval rating rose, and, as we saw, he took 48% of the popular vote, something six months earlier seemed unlikely in the extreme.

Because people liked him.

It reminded me of George W. Bush’s first campaign, when we kept hearing this “he seems like a guy I could sit down and have a beer with.”

As it turned out, that quality did not translate into good policy.  Honestly, there are many people I like but I wouldn’t even let them watch my dog.  Like does not translate to ability.

So my reaction was—is—what the hell?

What this tells me is that a candidate can misrepresent, lie, withhold, distort, tease, and otherwise spew nonsense, but if the voters like him, none of that matters.  (Let me remind you, Romney kept to a very casual relation to the truth in the debates; none of this is arguable, he either didn’t know what he was talking about or flat out lied.)  Furthermore, as I indicated early in the election cycle, he was an advocate for a failed policy.  People have had it demonstrated to them by everything short of utter and total economic collapse that the fiscal and tax policies of the GOP have not worked.

And yet.

People will ignore measures of competence, reasonableness, sound judgment, and policy and vote for someone because they like him?

For the record, I’ve done the reverse myself—voted for someone because I didn’t like his or her opponent.  I get that. (Heck, I did it this time.)  They did or said something that turned me off.  But frankly, how much I liked the candidate for whom I voted played little part in my decision.

This is something that beggars the imagination.  I deal with this in the arts all the time.  Basically, there is the artist…and there is the work.  It is the work that matters.  I don’t care (usually) if the artist is the reincarnation of Simon Legree, if the work he or she produces has merit, that is what counts.  (Yes, there are exceptions, but it takes a great deal to force me to abandon this principle.)  What matters if So-n-So was an alcoholic womanizer who kicked puppies, if the novel he wrote or the music he made moves and inspires us, that is the salient point.

So to—perhaps more so—with politicians.  I want someone who will do the job well, not someone I might be able to “sit down and have a beer with.”

Like that would ever happen anyway.

I didn’t respond to the nonsense about Romney putting his dog in a crate on the roof of his car, because it had nothing to do with his qualifications as a potential president.  We try to ignore the religious leanings of candidates for the same reason.  Personal foible, the vagaries of “character” are slippery, tectonic grounds on which to base such an important decision.  I don’t care how much I might “like” a candidate for the school board, if he or she doesn’t understand basic science or thinks the Earth is the center of the solar system, I will not vote for that person.  Competence trumps personality.

(Besides, how the hell are we supposed to gauge “like” or “dislike” in such a context?  No matter what the image presented may be, none of us know that person, nor will likely ever know them.  “Like” in this case is purely a projection, our own hopes and desires put on someone we may never meet in person.  We aren’t “liking” them so much as liking what we want of ourselves that we imagine reflected in the candidate.)

Back in 1952, Adlai Stevenson, possibly the most intelligent, educated, and competent politician vying for high office, lost to Eisenhower because, as it was spun at the time, he was an intellectual elitist.  I think we were fortunate that Eisenhower possessed a competence of a different sort, but the fact is people did not vote for him because of that competence, but because “We Like Ike!”  Kennedy defeated Nixon because of his “personality.”  (Famously, the debates held showed an interesting divergence—those who listened on radio said Nixon had won, those who watched on television said Kennedy had.  Depending on the medium, “personality” favored the candidate who could appeal best through the insubstantiality of “likeableness.”)  Hubert Humphrey lost to Nixon because he could not translate policy competence into the kind of popular “like” that Bobby Kennedy clearly had.  George McGovern, four years later, never overcame a certain dourness, which is something when you consider that Nixon was possibly the least likeable president since Coolidge.

And on that note, it is only in recent years that people have been acknowledging what competence Nixon did possess, digging its way out from beneath the ignominy of his ultimate paranoid ogre image.

George H.W. Bush was by far the better qualified contender in 1980, but Reagan had “like” all over everyone.  Reagan is still forgiven for the damage he did by virtue of a profound lack of grasp because people think back fondly on him as someone they liked immensely.

This is a lousy way to choose a president.

Competence should have favored John Huntsman in the primaries.

Probably, if competence had triumphed, we’d be looking at a second term for Hilary Clinton today.

But in fairness, just how are we to judge competence when we collectively know so little about what the job entails?  People vote for the candidate they think will be “on their side” and the only way to pick that is to go with gut reactions.  We “like” one or the other.

That could be partly rectified by simply paying more attention.  But that’s the other problem with us, collectively—frankly, my dear, outside whatever issue adrenalizes us at the moment, we don’t give a damn.  And that’s why we keep getting representatives who in the end don’t really represent us.

How do you like that?

culture

…And Another Observation…

I’m listening to the Republican strategists trying to figure out what happened and can’t help but feel that they’re still missing something.

Several of them are claiming that they lost because their candidate was “not conservative enough.”  That this “betrayed” their values and led to a failure to bring off the electoral coup they’d hoped for.

I’m shaking my head. “Not conservative enough?”  Please. You had a couple of those and your own base chose someone else.  If those “values” of which you speak mattered that much, Rick Santorum would have been your man.  Maybe Michele Bachman, but, if I’m reading your values correctly, she has a major flaw—she’s female.  The fact is, your own primary season selected against the more conservative candidate.  (Given that by and large only the true Party faithful vote in primaries, in either Party, we can properly say that this represents your base.)  The more consistently conservative choices were weeded out.  Santorum on one end, Johnson on the other.  They chose Romney because he represented the desires of the Party faithful.

Which brings us to the problem.  Which Party?

The reason the GOP lost this time (and frankly it wasn’t much of a loss, popular-vote-wise) is because it is made up of two very different kinds of Americans.

On the one hand, you have those Republican voters who are all about the money.  They don’t want taxes going up and they don’t want the government spending what money it does have on things they find wasteful.  These folks are borderline Libertarian in many ways.  They believe they are the only arbiters of their destiny and know better than the government how to manage their own lives.  They believe in the independent American.

On the other side, you have a solid group of people who, if you forgive the language, are all about stopping people from fucking.  When you look at all the things they want stopped—gay marriage, abortion, access to contraception, banning of pornography—and all the things they support—traditional marriage, a resurgent religiosity—it is obvious that they are terribly concerned about what other people are doing in bed.  Never mind how you feel about this as an issue, this is what it boils down to.

These two groups are not natural allies.

The first group to a large extent believes the individual has the right to determine his or her own life choices and they want the government to step back.  They believe they are the arbiters of their own fate.

The second group believes in binding everyone to a single fate.

Or at least into a standard model of conformity.

They are bound together only by the single point of convergence that neither group likes the way things currently are being run.

But the “fiscal” conservatives do not necessarily find the “social” conservatives, at least not in their extremes, particularly appealing.

So the GOP has a fundamental tension in its belly.

That is why they lost.

At least nationally.  In the congressional districts, where incessant redistricting has created enclaves where one or the other of these two groups have come to dominate, congressional elections went well for them—not so much the senate, which is from a much wider base.

Anyway, it’s amusing to listen to these folks opine that they need to find someone more conservative next time.  What did they think would have happened if Rick Santorum had gotten the nomination this time?  He’s only slightly less—what’s the phrase?—“out of the mainstream” than Todd Akin.

They need to do something about the worm in their belly.

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Addendum: in my own state, Missouri, talk about why we’ve gotten so much Redder led one analyst to opine that it’s the result of the fact that we have fewer Latinos, that we’ve fallen behind the national shift in diversity.  While that may be true, I think it misses the point: it says nothing about the mindset of the people who do live here, and that’s the relevant question.

culture

2016

As usual, Florida is still undecided, a mess. According to NPR, though, it is leaning heavily toward Obama, despite the shenanigans of the state GOP in suppressing the vote.

I didn’t watch last night.  Couldn’t.  We went to bed early.

But then Donna got up around midnight and woke me by a whoop of joy that I briefly mistook for anguish.

To my small surprise and relief, Obama won.

I will not miss the constant electioneering, the radio ads, the tv spots, the slick mailers.  I will not miss keeping still in mixed groups about my politics (something I am not good at, but this election cycle it feels more like holy war than an election).  I will not miss wincing everytime some politician opens his or her mouth and nonsense spills out.  (This is, of course, normal, but during presidential years it gets much, much worse.)  I will not miss…

Anyway, the election came out partially the way I expected, in those moments when I felt calm enough to think rationally.  Rationality seemed in short supply this year and mine was sorely tasked. So now, I sit here sorting through my reactions, trying to come up with something cogent to say.

I am disappointed the House is still Republican, but it seems a number of the Tea Party robots from 2010 lost their seats, so maybe the temperature in chambers will drop a degree or two and some business may get done.

Gary Johnson, running as a Libertarian, pulled 350,000 votes as of nine last night.  Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, got around 100,000.  (Randall Terry received 8700 votes, a fact that both reassures me and gives me shivers—there are people who will actually vote for him?)

Combined, the independent candidates made virtually no difference nationally.  Which is a shame, really.  I’ve read both Stein’s and Johnson’s platforms and both of them are willing to address the problems in the system.  Johnson is the least realistic of the two and I like a lot of the Green Party platform.

But the Greens are going about it bass-ackward.  Vying for the presidency when you can’t even get elected dog catcher in most states is hardly the way to go about it.  What would she do if by some weirdness she got elected?  I think it fair to say a Green presidency this morning would guarantee both major parties working together for the foreseeable future against her.  No, what they need to do is start winning local elections.  Start with city councils and school boards, work up to state legislatures, then a governor or three, and finally Congress.  Yes, that will take time, maybe far more time than anyone has the patience for, but for goodness sake, start.

Which leaves me feeling mixed about the next four years.

Here is what I would like to see happen.  Obviously, Joe Biden is not going to run for office in 2016.  Even if he did, I doubt he’d win, but I think he’s V.P. the same way Dick Cheney was.  An ace in the hole if something happens to the Pres, but not a threat in the next election.  Therefore, the House Republicans have no excuse but to work with the Democrats to get something done.  However you spin it, the last four years have been, in my view, a criminal abdication of responsibility on the part of the GOP, all to “make sure Obama is a one-term president.”  They have squandered the People’s confidence and time and treasure in a party feud that frankly has no real basis other than on the fringes.

That said, the next four years should give them permission to get something done for the country.  They don’t have to work to defeat Obama in 2016, he’s not running then.  Anything that gets done, they can take credit for.  Whoever runs for the Democratic nomination in 2016, it will be a repeat of 2008—two brand-spanking new candidates.  (Romney has said he won’t run again.  We’ll see.)  So there is no reason other than the meanest kind of pettiness to keep blocking.

It is time we got over this artificial divide about capitalism vs. socialism.  We are supposed to be grown-ups here, labels shouldn’t scare us.  The best antidote for that kind of fear is to actually learn something about what scares you, and as far as I can see most of the people who are so terrified that Obama is some kind of socialist (or communist!) are exercising the same kind of intelligence on the subject as those who believe he’s a Muslim or is not a citizen.  (They are exemplified by the sign carrier demanding “Keep your government out of my MediCare!”)  For pity’s sake, people, read a book!

I’ve said this before, probably to little effect, but I will say it again, Capitalism is a system, not some kind of organic natural law thing.  As such, we determine its shape and how it should be used, not the other way around, and it is the same with any other system (like Socialism).  After the Great Depression this country put in place a number of socialist ideas and whether certain folks wish it to be true or not, they have worked well for us as a nation.

Here are a few things that people should consider.  One, any economic system is, at its simplest, simply a method for organizing latent wealth.  By latent wealth I mean the potential product in a given community.  (You can live on a mountain of diamonds but if some kind of organizing principle is not applied to take advantage of those diamonds, they just sit there.  The system you use organizes the work needed to exploit the resource.  But let’s be clear—the person or corporation that brings that system into that community does not by dint of that fact own the labor, the land, or the total product.  The community living there has to give permission, cooperate, and assist in implementing the organizing system, and therefore when Elizabeth Warren made her famous statement that “you didn’t build that all by yourself” that is what she meant, and anyone who claims not to understand that I think is being deliberately obtuse.)  Therefore, we should be willing to apply the methodology best suited to solve specific problems.  We are a polyglot nation, we already use a variety of methodologies depending on region and circumstance, we need to stop being knee-jerk reactionary about this subject.

Consequently, we need to understand a couple of things in slightly different ways.  Currently, we have a problem with large businesses extracting latent wealth from communities and shifting it away from those communities, in fact away from our national borders altogether.  One of the chief tools to counter that is taxes.  Tax dollars drain off a portion of that wealth and return it to the community.  Taxes fix the location of a certain proportion of generated wealth.  Bitch about government spending all you want, the fact remains that money gets spent, in the main, here and therefore helps sustain the community.

To a lesser extent, this fight over minimum wage and Right To Work is misguided.  Requiring businesses to pay a fair wage to their employees also serves to keep that wealth local.  You don’t build a business in Idaho and then, because shareholders are complaining that their dividends are too low, shift those jobs out of the country to increase bottomline.  It should be illegal for businesses to take advantage of location for fiscal purposes while utilizing outsourcing in order to extract money that then does not return to that community.  Right To Work is merely a tactic to suppress local ability to retain local wealth.  We need to start looking at these two things this way or we will see ourselves the richest Third World nation on the planet.

I want to see the military-industrial complex curtailed if not shut down.  Eisenhower warned us of this, but his warning was not based on something that hadn’t happened.  The Spanish-American War is our most famous example of a war begun by private industry for the sole purpose of increasing profits.  We are locked in a cycle of perpetual preparedness and in order to justify the expenditures, we engage in constant military conflict.  We have provided the United Nations with the backbone of its policing power for decades, and while this made sense in the aftermath of WWII when most of the world was devastated, it no longer does—the world has recovered, they can afford to pony up soldiers and materiél.  I support the idea of the United Nations, but the United States has been shouldering a disproportionate share for decades.  I suspect the main reason we have not stopped has entirely to do with the money-making of the defense contractor sector.

Along with that, we must pull back from the blatantly unConstitutional internal security and intelligence practices that have become worse since 9/11.  I was sorely upset when Obama reauthorized the defense authorization act.

But worse than the standing military, that act, along with others, has allowed us to do an end-run around Posse Commitatus by militarizing local police forces.  Our police have become more and more akin to the Stazi in make-up and outlook and this has to stop before we are so inured to it that we can’t recognize loss of civil rights until the cop is knocking on our door for a warrantless search of our home.

A large step to undoing this would be to do something about this absurd war on drugs.  I am not a fan of drugs—hell, I never even smoked a joint—but our response has been distorting of our courts and our police and our national priorities.  The only thing that keeps us from doing something rational is the huge amounts of money involved at all levels.  This has to stop.  We can’t afford to keep doing this, not so much from a fiscal point of view but from the effect it has on all of us, a coarsening of our national psyché, a desensitization to individual circumstance.

Lastly, I would like to see an effort made to address the pathetic state of our educational priorities.  We are becoming a severely divided nation, not so much along class lines (although that is true, too, and I suspect the two are linked), but along the lines of the Knows and the Know Nothings.

Todd Akin sat on the House subcommittee for science.  Need I say more?  (Yes, I probably do.)  All right.  Akin is a supporter of creationism.  I don’t have any problem with someone espousing that view—what I have a problem with is someone with that view serving on what should be a science committee, and with people being okay with that.  If that were not enough, his statements about women’s biology demonstrated that he knows little—or doesn’t care—about actual science (never mind what his views on women’s rights are), and this is a very serious problem, not so much that an elected official should be ignorant along these lines, but that he is representative of people who are even more ignorant.  That goes to education.

No Child Left Behind was one in a string of legislative actions that turned schooling into a horse race.  Getting the scores up are all that matter, so our “ranking” doesn’t fall.  This has nothing to do with what it actually taught or what kids really know when they get out of school.  We need a serious reform lest we keep producing people who, through no real fault of their own, believe the Earth is only six thousand years old and understand next to nothing about biology, never mind evolution.

And I’m sorry—just because you have decided in advance that you don’t believe something doesn’t make it either not true or give you the right to keep others from learning about it.  Nor does it let you off the hook from knowing enough about it to make an informed decision about rejecting it.

I am not by disposition an isolationist, but I do believe this country has been engaging the rest of the world in the wrong way.  We have been—always—very proactive when it comes to defending our business interests overseas, and the overwhelming amount of our foreign policy is less individual-oriented as it is corporation-oriented.  Granted, this simplifies things—but it also distorts things and leads us to make bad choices in places where we don’t know the culture.  We’re paying a heavy price for that from the Fifties.  Our priorities need to change from corporatocracy to our oft-stated and seldom-deployed belief in the individual.

There are other things on my mind, but that’s enough for now.

That’s what I would like to see happen.

What do I expect?

We have been engaged, at street level, in a battle over what it means to be an American, and the ingredients have gotten bizarre.  We have forgotten somewhere along the way that our right to have that battle is our chief defining national characteristic, that winning it is both impossible and beside the point.  Being able to disagree and still have barbecue together has always been the American miracle, and we’ve been losing that.

But I expect it to continue.  Both parties, plus the corporate backing of both parties, have been feeding that conflict because, well, it’s been good for business.  In the crossfire we have forgotten what is genuinely important and started handing over our liberties like good soldiers in an endless war.  So in truth, I expect any real progress to happen on the margins, at times and in places where national attention is elsewhere, under conditions of exhaustion, when no one is paying much notice.  The bread and circuses will continue—well, the circuses, anyway, I’m not so sure about the bread.

The world chimed in recently in polls that asked who other countries wished to see win the election.  In the run up, surveys in over 20 countries indicated a vast preference for Obama—the only two that favored Romney were Israel and Pakistan.  Hm.

But for now, what I’m looking forward to is a few weeks with considerably less politicking.  I’m a bit frazzled from concern.  I have some fiction to write and Christmas to prepare for.

The thing I’m most pleased about?  Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren.  I’ll leave you to figure out why.

Have a good day.

culture

Oh, And One More Thing…Or Two…

Yes, yes, I said no more politics till after the election, but that just goes to show you the pitfalls of making promises you may be unable to keep.  But I didn’t actually make a promise, not like, um, a politician.

The weekend is upon us.  Next Tuesday a goodly portion of the citizens of this country will step into voting booths and choose…the next four to six years of leadership.

I have written about why I will not vote for Mitt Romney.  “Mitten” as he is affectionately known by those in Massachussetts glad to see him no longer governor, is not my idea of a president.  To reiterate what I wrote in that piece, my chief problem with him is that he is an advocate for a failed fiscal policy.  Trickle down economics did not work, has not worked, will not work, so it seems ludicrous—no, stupid—to assume it would work just because it’s Romney and not Reagan.

But have Obama’s policies done much better?

If you’re one of those still un- or under-employed, you probably don’t think so. All you have on your mind is “Where are the jobs?!?”  (Interestingly, Romney this week started talking about the unemployed who are not usually counted by the national labor board, a subject I’ve complained about in the past—actual unemployment is much higher than the number cited monthly, much higher, and always has been.  Do I think Romney has twigged to a deeper truth and might do something about it?  No.  It’s a tactic.  Someone whispered in his ear “Hey, boss, if we talk about these people we can make Obama look really bad.”  It’s bullshit coming from him.)  But for a lot of people who either were at risk for losing their jobs or have found employment in the slowly growing economy, no, things aren’t as bad or worse than they were.  Romney is citing the fact that this month’s unemployment went up—from 7.8% to 7.9%, which is higher than when Obama took office.  This is spin, of course, because Obama took office just when the real toll of the Bush recession (and why they keep calling it that, I don’t know, it was a depression and still it, because of all those folks Romney just discovered) was washing ashore.  It was over 10%, we must not forget, and has dropped.

Now, the thing a lot of people are bitching about is how slowly the recovery is happening.  They overlook the fact that recovery is happening and is expected to continue steadily for the next four years (so much so that Romney has been taking advance credit for jobs that would be created no matter who wins next Tuesday).  It is frankly better in the long-run for this to happen slowly rather than do something to superheat it and blow up a new bubble that will burst in 10 or 15 years, but that doesn’t matter much to people who can’t find work. Fair enough.  But that begs the question as to why these same folks might vote for someone who has sided with policies that will only hurt them more.

More?  The GOP as it currently exists is anti-union, anti-minimum wage, and anti-fiscal regulation.  If you work for a living any one of these runs counter to your best interests, but we have a trifecta here of antagonism toward the working class and a good chunk of the middle class.  Every state that has adopted Right To Work as law and busted the unions has seen standards of living go down.  Wages go down.  Quality of working conditions go down.  As for minimum wage laws, they barely raise the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of people in the first place—eliminate it and you drive those people even further down.  Those who have never worked for minimum wage may not realize that this is not for students anymore, but a lot of families are trying to get by on minimum wage.

As for the demand to deregulate the financial sector further, pardon my directness, but just how stupid are you?  It was deregulation that allowed the practices of the banks which caused the 2008 meltdown.  So now you want to go back to those circumstances?  Capitalism is a wonderful thing if you put a harness on it and control it, but left to “the Market” it is a ravening beast that could care less about Bob Cratchitt and Tiny Tim.

So given all this, just why in hell would anyone vote for these people?  It beggars the imagination.

But—politics is like sex: when you get right down to it, it’s just a matter of what turns you on, what appeals. It’s a limbic system thing, and generally makes no sense.

Which in that regard makes Romney ideal.

Not many people have talked about his religion through the campaign, which for the most part I approve.  Religion ought to have no part in this.

But that’s not the same as saying it doesn’t play on people’s minds, that it isn’t a consideration.  Sure, it bothered me when Jimmy Carter made a deal out of his evangelicalism.  Every time some politico mouths off about “putting god back in [fill in the blank]” I cringe.*

In this case, I will remark on Romney’s religion as an aspect of his character.  He has campaigned diligently with unexpected agility.  He’s told a lot of half-truths, some outright lies, fabricated some stuff out of whole cloth.

And apparently believes every word of it.

He’s a Mormon.  As such, he must be facile at accepting nonsense as truth.  (Disclaimer: my parents were Mormons, I am more than passing familiar with Mormonism.  While never one myself, I’ve had many a conversation with visiting teachers.  I’ve read the two principle books—yes, there are two of them, The Book of Mormon and A Pearl of Great Price—and I considered joining, so allow me to claim I know a little something about it.)  We have the documentation, the history, and can weigh the claims of Mormonism.  This isn’t some ancient thing of which most of the pertinent texts are missing and the civilization that invented it lies in ruins over which archaeologists must pore to reconstruct.  It’s a recent advent.  It is very much like Scientology in many ways.

It is a compendium of the improbable, the fantastic, and the patently false.  In order to believe it, one must be willing to suspend all credulity, divorce it from critical thinking, and pretend the world is different from what it clearly is.  One must ignore evidence, be willing to cut off friends and family who dare to speak ill of Joe Smith and Brigham, accept a cosmogeny created virtually from whole cloth by a man fleeing New York ahead of creditors and charges for fraud.  It is so obviously bullshit, that it is the perfect mirror of the mindset of a politician willing to front for things he or she might never accept outside of the arena.

I will therefore also not vote for Romney because he is so utterly gullible.

Okay.

So am I gleefully and whole-heartedly casting my vote for Obama?  I will vote for him because I do not want a GOP-dominated government.  But it is far from whole-hearted.  He has disappointed me in many things, but I can’t in clear conscience vote my choice and risk seeing Romney win.

(In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a very partisan post—not so much partisan for anyone as against.)

I’d like to vote for Jill Stein.  Not so much because I agree with everything she touts, but because she’s so utterly despised by all the folks I despise.  She would be a refreshing change.

Look, under ordinary circumstances, the two parties we have dominating our politics are not really that different from each other.  These are not ordinary circumstances but the divide is over things that are normally at the margins.  If you want to fix the core, both parties need to be overhauled completely.

We need a viable third party, one not funded by corporate money or tied to the people with the biggest mouths.

But until someone like Jill Stein can garner better than the paltry percentage she does, most of us see our choices forced.

So this coming Tuesday I’m voting against Mitt Romney…and against just about every Republican candidate on the slate, because they are all of them espousing nonsense in my opinion.  They’re not even good Libertarians, not that I’d particularly want them to be, but that way they’d at least keep their opinions about peoples’ private lives out of the public arena.

But come 2016 I’d love to see a viable third option.

VOTE!

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* Let me explain.  It’s not god per se that I object to (how can I when I don’t believe he exists?) but the fact—the fact—that all this sanctimony is pretty much, in this context, Show.  Nothing but an act to parade piety in front of people and mask the fact that serious problem solving is not going on.  Putting god back in city hall will not stop the corruption.  Putting prayer back in school will not fix your failing educational system.  The public lip-service to a religiosity especially not embraced by the political actions of the people demanding it the most is a massive distraction.   Many of the same people most vociferously demanding this nonsense wouldn’t know “christian spirit” if it visited them on Christmas Eve.  What it really is, to be clear, is a song-and-dance to make their opponents appear curmudgeonly, evil, and on the wrong “side.”  I’m tired of people professing their christian values from one side of their mouths and then defending the death penalty out of the other.  Hypocrisy is a poor way to advocate for your country.

 

culture

Okay, I Couldn’t Resist

I know, I said no more political posts till after the election, but I couldn’t NOT put this one up. Before you freak out, watch all the way through. Then, I’m sure, no matter who you’re voting for, everyone will have a reason to freak out.

Oh, and one more thing. Check this post by P.Z. Myers. This pretty well sums up my feelings as well. I’ve had a low-level concern about the congressional elections longer and more consistently than the presidential campaign, but really, we ought to be worrying more about local elective offices even more—offices which traditionally get the lowest voter interest.

Anyway, I just wanted to share. See you on the other side.